


the work that i’ve done has left these marks on my hands

by Serie11



Category: Horizon: Zero Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Culture Shock, Developing Friendships, GAIA Prime Is Rebuilt, Gen, Getting to Know Each Other, Introspection, Post-Canon, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-12-16 02:11:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21028562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serie11/pseuds/Serie11
Summary: She has been shot with arrows, and all sorts of deathguns, and sliced with spears and machine-claws alike. Her bowstring has cut deeply into her fingers because she hadn’t had the opportunity tostop,and instead had to continue fighting on, and there are flickers of burn marks from when she was experimenting with her blast sling. Her skin is a litany of silent stories, a wealth of experiences that can be guessed at simply by looking at her. Most of the time, she doesn’t even think about it – she’s used to it. Her scars help her, even – the callouses on her hands and elbows and knees are there to protect her when her armour slips and she falls to the ground. Her body is tough, and she’s proud of that.It still comes as a shock when GAIA asks about the thin scar running across her neck.





	the work that i’ve done has left these marks on my hands

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sunspot (unavoidedcrisis)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unavoidedcrisis/gifts).

"Log one hundred and ninety three, day… I’ve lost count.

“GAIA Prime core has been stabilised, and the system has been rebooted. Everything looks like it’s running, and there hasn’t been any big errors thrown yet… just my luck, something will come up. GAIA herself – it’s strange. She talks like a real human, just like she’s another person. In all the logs that I found, of Elisabet and GAIA talking, it was just like there _was _two people there, but I suppose I wasn’t ready for the reality. It’s weird. She said that she needs to fetch her back up core data from another site, so she’s not running at full capacity at the moment, but her personality functions are all here. I left her running diagnostics while I get my head around all of this. After spending so much time locked up down here, with only myself for company, having someone else around makes me feel… strange. I made this place myself, but it was hers, originally. So why do I feel like she’s the invader when it’s her home? I made myself comfortable here, but it’s not mine, not really. Ugh.

“I guess it doesn’t help that… well, I don’t really know what to do with myself now. Win the Proving, get my answers, that was my goal at first. And then I had to find a way to get into the mountain – and then I had to stop HADES, and then I had to find a way to repair GAIA. Well, that’s all done now. What am I going to do, without something to aim towards? What’s the point of pulling back my bow if there’s no target to hit?”

Aloy clicks her Focus to end the log. Her desk is cluttered with translucent schematics, drawings and notes and lists of things that she might need to fix next. She sorts through them to select the ones that she knows are useful and files them in their appropriate folders, and deletes the ones she knows are wrong. The remaining files sit in front of her, ready to be opened and poured over, ready for Aloy to start tweaking them. She turns off her Focus instead. GAIA or the system alarm will tell her if there’s anything that needs fixing next. For now… well, she supposes she should sleep.

It’s not easy, with all the thoughts of what’s going to happen next running through her head. The possibilities alone… she’s sure she’s only thought of some of them. Aloy takes a deep breath, in and out. Tossing and turning in her bed won’t help fix anything.

_Tomorrow. I can think about this tomorrow. _

* * *

Aloy has never led a safe life.

She is strong and she has been loved, but she has never been _safe. _As a child, Aloy knew that even in their warm shelter, machines could choose to rip apart their walls at any time. She knew that one misstep with her knife could leave her bleeding, because it had happened. Rost believed in giving her the tools and skills that she needed to survive by herself in the wilds, and he’d followed that from the very moment he was entrusted with her. When she’d been seven, she’d accidentally dropped her knife, and had clumsily caught it with her other hand – not thinking about the sharp blade that it had. It had sliced deeply into her palm, and the combination of the pain and the blood had made her panic. After Rost had carefully bound her hand so that she couldn’t see the blood any more, he had told her that she had to do better.

That was only the first of many scars. Even in the relative quiet of the Embrace, there were still challenges aplenty for a young girl in search of adventure. Aloy had scraped her knees on rocks, roughened her palms climbing every cliff that looked scalable (and plenty that she thought would be impossible. She’d proved herself wrong, but it had cost streaks of red across her palms). The wilds left their marks speckled across her skin, freckles from the sun, rough hands from holding her bow, scrapes and bruises and thin white lines from before she had started hunting machines. Rost had made her stalk and study them, made sure that she recognised their calls and behaviours before he put a bow in her hand and said that she could shoot. At the time she had almost resented it, burning with the desire to prove herself. As an adult, she can’t begin to count the amount of times that having that knowledge buried deep in the back of her mind has saved her life. 

Her true combat encounters with both humans and machines had not been kind to her, either. She has been shot with arrows, and all sorts of deathguns, and sliced with spears and machine-claws alike. Her bowstring has cut deeply into her fingers because she hadn’t had the opportunity to _stop, _and instead had to continue fighting on, and there are flickers of burn marks from when she was experimenting with her blast sling. Her skin is a litany of silent stories, a wealth of experiences that can be guessed at simply by looking at her. Most of the time, she doesn’t even think about it – she’s used to it. Her scars help her, even – the callouses on her hands and elbows and knees are there to protect her when her armour slips and she falls to the ground. Her body is tough, and she’s proud of that.

It still comes as a shock when GAIA asks about the thin scar running across her neck.

Aloy bites her tongue until she tastes blood. It’s – a reminder. GAIA knows as much about her as she does about GAIA – not a lot. Even with all her processing power, even with the ability and knowledge to control machines and create new ones as needed, GAIA can’t read her mind. Though, she shouldn’t have to.

“Haven’t you copied all the files on my Focus?” Aloy asks. “They should tell you enough.”

“You have not granted me permission to access those files, Aloy,” GAIA says, her voice echoing around the central control chamber. Aloy doesn’t know where it comes from, really. Just that no matter where she is in this facility, GAIA can always hear her and can always answer her.

“Oh,” Aloy says. “I thought –” She cuts herself off. She doesn’t know what she thought, really. Just that GAIA had the power to do something, and that Aloy had something that GAIA was interested in. She hadn’t been expecting GAIA to _ask. _

“While I have the capability to hack into your Focus, I would not breach your privacy for a reason as small as my curiosity,” GAIA says. “Your files are your own, Aloy. But if you are willing to talk to me, so we can get to know each other better, I would like that.”

Get to know each other better… some of the turns of phrases that GAIA uses are strange. In the Nora tribe, there is knowing _of _a person, and knowing _a _person. You introduce yourself with your name while clasping hands with someone, in order to allow them the grace of shaping your Goddess given name with their lips. The titles of Seeker and Machine Tamer had followed Aloy across the Sundom, and she had been glad that few knew her real name, because it meant that none of the people she came across would call her by name without her giving them permission. She didn’t particularly care about the consequences that the other party would supposedly face from the goddess, but – it had felt weird. Far too intimate, for people that she did not know. They only knew of her, tales and stories of her exploits. Aloy did not know them at all. It was far easier to have the barrier of namelessness between them. Made it easier to breathe.

None of that makes it easier to try and talk to GAIA. Aloy had given her name when GAIA had first awoken, but now it doesn’t feel like it was enough.

“I already introduced myself,” Aloy says, trying not to sound too frustrated. “I suppose… you didn’t. I already knew your name.” She winces at the realisation.

“Is an introduction so important in Nora culture?” GAIA asks, sounding genuinely curious. “Then I have been amiss. Aloy, my name is GAIA. Please, feel free refer to me as such.”

Aloy lets out a sigh of relief. “Thank you, GAIA.” She scrolls past a few of the ‘reports’ that GAIA is starting to accumulate, and have translated into something that Aloy can read after she’d voiced her curiosity. “But I think you meant something else when you said that we should get to know each other.”

“You have been in this facility for a consecutive two hundred and nine days,” GAIA tells her. “From that I can draw conclusions as to your tenaciousness, your work ethic, and your stubbornness. But it cannot tell me what your favourite colour, or your favourite food – it cannot tell me about the place where you grew up, or the trials that you have faced to stand before me. I would like to know those things.”

Aloy stares at GAIA’s hologram, the soft purple overtones of the display tinting her skin. “Why?” she asks. “Is it… just because I’m Elisabet’s daughter?”

“No,” GAIA tells her. “Although Elisabet’s aspirations and dreams have driven your footsteps, and although I see an echo of her in you, that is not why. Aloy, you have restored me – you have worked, tirelessly, to do so. I have only respect for that, and for your wish to set the world back in balance.”

“Oh,” Aloy says. She stares at the reports so she won’t have to look at GAIA. She’s worked so hard for this – she’d never really expected GAIA to see her as anything but an extension of Elisabet. To have that not be the case…

“You can ask me questions to, if you’re interested,” GAIA says. “I still need to retrieve my core data banks, but I still have much at my disposal.”

Aloy lets out the breath she had been holding. “Just getting you up and running is what I really want at the moment,” she admits. “Beyond that, I haven’t really thought of much.”

They’re quiet for a bit, as GAIA’s processing hums in the background, and as Aloy reads diagnostics and print outs and tries to parse what she wants from GAIA, and what GAIA wants from her, and what she wants to do, going forward.

“Why did you ask about that scar?” Aloy eventually asks. Her skin is littered with story-hooks, places that GAIA could have started, without the obvious connotations of a sliced throat.

GAIA hums quietly, a different sound from when she’s just processing. “It… displeases me. It is a mark that you were in a place of great danger once. I would see that you were kept out of similar situations in the future, if at all possible.”

She hasn’t talked to another human in so long – that’s why she can’t seem to get her tongue to form the words that she wants. That has to be it.

“I would like to protect you,” GAIA continues, softer. “But I also know that it might be a topic you have trouble talking about. You do not have to share if you do not wish to.”

“The person who did this to me is already dead,” Aloy says all in a rush, like the words she’d been trying to summon had built up behind her teeth and had poured out as soon as she’d opened her mouth. “You don’t need to worry.”

“As much as I treasure human life… I am glad to hear that,” GAIA says.

Aloy looks up at GAIA’s face – well, a hologram of her face, anyway. Or maybe that counts as her face? It should, Aloy decides. Her brow is wrinkled slightly, and she’s looking at Aloy and she _sees _her.

Aloy thinks of a faraway land, a hard won race, and a father she cherishes. She’s so rarely spoken to anyone who didn’t already know about those events – and who she wanted to know about those events. 

She wants GAIA to know. And she doubts that she’ll ever find someone else who’s more willing to listen.

“It all began when I was a kid who wanted answers…”


End file.
